A new stage in the Cubanization of Venezuela: the Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) have now arrived.
I received an email from Venezuela describing a new situation: Neighbors in the same buildings reporting anyone who protests to the National Guard, who then tear down the front door and arrest all the people in the apartment of the alleged protesters.

Fidel Castro’s “collective system of revolutionary vigilance,” in a new country.

So, rather than having to appear at an OAS meeting and look like a brutal repressive fool, it is better to turn over the table and refuse to play. See, Maduro and its Cuban masters are understanding that the regime image is so deteriorated that they cannot count on a favorable OAS verdict no matter how much they have spent to buy its votes.

In other words, pushed against the wall, Cuba ordered Maduro to start breaking up with the OAS, a long held dear dream of Castro and Chavez, with already sabotage to the OAS by supporting someone like its incompetent secretary Insulza or creating CELAC and UNASUR to annul OAS cover.

I need to add a footnote probably lost in translation. After the electoral fraud of April 2013 Panama’s president was one of the rare few to travel to Caracas and visit Maduro as the real elected president. The reason was that Venezuela owes, I understand, more than a billion USD to Panama and that is a lot of money for a small country. Martinelli simply had to think of his people. But I suspect that he did not get paid anything for his troubles since Venezuela is bankrupt. So, he decided to screw Maduro by having Panama’s ambassador called an OAS meeting on Venezuela. After all, breaking with Panama is going to cost Maduro more than what it may cost Panama. Probably it will aggravate our economic crisis and make corrupt chavista upset that their assets risk being sort of frozen in Panama.

The government is an advocate for coca growers. The Iranian presence is increasing. And reports from the ground suggest that African extremists are joining the fray.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, who is also the elected president of the coca producers’ confederation, and Vice President Alvaro García Linera, formerly of the Maoist Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, began building their repressive narco-state when they took office in 2006.

Step one was creating a culture of fear. Scores of intellectuals, technocrats and former government officials were harassed. Many fled.
…
With the opposition cowed, President Morales has turned Bolivia into an international hub of organized crime and a safe haven for terrorists. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has been expelled. United Nations data show that cocaine production is up in Bolivia since 2006 and unconfirmed reports say that Mexican, Russian and Colombian toughs are showing up to get a piece of the action. So are militants looking to raise cash and operate in the Western Hemisphere.

The Tehran connection is no secret. Iran is a nonvoting member of the “Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas” ( ALBA ). Its voting members are Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Over in Buenos Aires, Cristina Fernandez was having conniptions over Evo’s detouring, and she tweeted it all in her official account, @CFKArgentina, which is now suspended. Correction:Account now visible

Luckily for us, Monica Showalter copied and quick-translated Cristina’s stream of consciousness (if you want to call it that), so here it is,

Cristina Kirchner @ CFKArgentina 1h
I will warn that Ollanta is calling a meeting of UNASUR. It’s 00:25 AM. Tomorrow will be a long and difficult day. Be calm. They will not succeed.
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Bolivia’s President Evo Morales is proud to encourage the cultivation of coca, the raw material for more than half of the cocaine and crack consumed in Brazil, arguing that its leaves are used to produce tea and traditional medicines. However, the United Nations (UN) estimates that only one-third of the coca planted in the country is necessary to meet this demand. The rest is used for drug trafficking and, consequently, contributes to corrupting the lives of nearly one million Brazilians and their families. Recently, evidence has emerged that the Bolivian government’s complicity with drug trafficking goes beyond a simple defense of the cocaleros, or coca growers. VEJA magazine had access to the reports produced by an intelligence unit of the Bolivian police which reveal, among other facts, a direct connection between Morales’ confidante, Minister of the Presidency Juan Ramón Quintana, and a Brazilian drug trafficker currently serving a sentence in Catanduvas, a maximum-security prison in Paraná.

A must-read for those wanting to know what is going on in South America. Read the whole thing.

The international left has explained Mr. Morales’s early popularity in racial terms, painting him and his white upper-class Marxist Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera as noble liberators of an indigenous nation. This ignores the fact that a majority of Bolivians are culturally mestizo, meaning that regardless of their bloodlines they no longer live like their ancestors did 500 years ago and they speak Spanish. What the socialists also miss is that indigenous Bolivians are no more interested in being tyrannized by someone who looks like them than by someone who doesn’t.

Things ought to be going well for Mr. Morales. Bolivia is a resource supplier, and commodity prices on the whole are booming. Yet the economy has performed only so-so. Gross domestic product averaged an anemic 2.9% annual growth from 2005 through 2010. Last year it expanded at an estimated 5% but still missed the 6% target that economists say developing countries must maintain over a decade to make an impact on poverty rates.

One reason is the dearth of private investment. Total investment is running around 16% of GDP when something closer to 25% is needed to generate strong, long-term growth. Worse, most of that investment comes from the public sector and is increasingly financed by the central bank. Private investment has been running at only 6% to 7% of GDP, suggesting that investors are worried about country risk.

His gas industry venture isn’t working out well either. After the 2006 gas nationalization, he backtracked on a long-term contract to supply Brazil through a Petrobras pipeline and tried to raise the price. Petrobras responded by increasing its capacity to handle imported liquefied natural gas and began to invest heavily to exploit domestic Brazilian resources. It is no longer reliant on Bolivian gas.

Meanwhile, Mr. Morales’s real problem, Bolivian hatred of his authoritarianism, is spinning out of control. The trouble started with a December 2010 effort to raise gasoline prices by 70%. The uprising—known as the gasolinazo—was so violent that he was forced to back down. The incident badly damaged his image.

Next he announced plans to put a Brazilian-financed highway through an Indian reserve in the Bolivian Amazon known by its Spanish initials as the Tipnis. Inhabitants asked for a rerouting to spare their ancestral lands. When Mr. Morales refused, hundreds of Indians took off on a 500-kilometer protest march to La Paz. Along the way they encountered a pro-Morales roadblock and were tear-gassed by police. When the government rounded up some 300 marchers and tried to fly them out of the area, local townspeople set fires on the airport runway in solidarity with the captives.

Mr. Morales has suspended construction on the highway but is still insisting that the road be built because the coca growers—his most important constituency—need it to expand their businesses.

And, yes, Spanish corporations ought to take the hint that investing in countries led by Marxists is not wise.

Since 2000, cultivation of coca leaves—cocaine’s raw material—plunged 65% in Colombia, to 141,000 acres in 2010, according to United Nations figures. In the same period, cultivation surged more than 40% in Peru, to 151,000 acres, and more than doubled in Bolivia, to 77,000 acres.

More important, Bolivia and Peru are now making street-ready cocaine, whereas they once mostly supplied raw ingredients for processing in Colombia. In 2010, Peru may have passed Colombia as the world’s biggest producer, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Between 2009 and 2010, Peru’s potential to produce cocaine grew 44%, to 325 metric tons. In 2010, Colombia’s potential production was 270 metric tons.

Meanwhile, Venezuela and Ecuador are rising as smuggling hubs.

Those of you who think this cocaine is only produced for consumption outside Latin America, do take note that Brazilian police say 80% of that country’s cocaine supply comes from Bolivia.

Noteworthy was a comment by Lebanon’s drug enforcement chief, Colonel Adel Mashmoushi, who stated that one path used by Hezbollah’s drug trafficking friends into Lebanon was “aboard a weekly Iranian-operated flight from Venezuela to Damascus and then over the border [from Syria].” The air bridge between Caracas and Tehran has long been a significant security concern.

Is it a coincidence that Bolivia has the largest Iranian embassy in the hemisphere, and that Ahmadinejad has visited the region five times – last week stopping in Ecuador and Venezuela?

iran, whose embassy in Bolivia is the largest in our hemisphere, sent Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi to Bolivia at the Bolivian Defense Ministry’s invitation.

While in Bolivia, Vahidi attended a ceremony with President Evo Morales,

The article does not touch on the question of what the nature of Vahidi’s visit to the BDM would be. However, apparently Argentinian officials must have protested, because Bolivia’s foreign minister wrote a letter of apology to the Argentinian foreign minister, and Vahidi was sent out of the country. The apology claimed that

The invitation . . . had been issued by the Bolivian defence ministry which did not know the background to the case and had not co-ordinated with other departments.

In a global triangulation that would excite any conspiracy buff, the globalization of terrorism now links Colombian FARC with Hezbollah, Iran with Russia, elected governments with violent insurgencies, uranium with AK-103s, and cocaine with oil. At the center of it all, is Latin America—especially the countries under the influence of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

There are enough connections to make your hair stand on end: the FARC, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua,

So, on one side Venezuela is funding and arming the FARC; on the other it is purchasing nuclear reactors and weapons from the Russians; on yet another, it is sending money to Iran and helping it find and enrich uranium. And then there is Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanon-based asset.

Reports that Venezuela has provided Hezbollah operatives with Venezuelan national identity cards are so rife, they were raised in the July 27, 2010, Senate hearing for the recently nominated U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Larry Palmer. When Palmer answered that he believed the reports, Chávez refused to accept him as ambassador in Venezuela. Meanwhile, Iran Air, the self-proclaimed “airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” operates a Tehran-Caracas flight commonly referred to as “Aeroterror” by intelligence officials for allegedly facilitating the access of terrorist suspects to South America. The Venezuelan government shields passenger lists from Interpol on that flight.

Iran, meanwhile, has developed significant relationships elsewhere in Latin America – most prominently with Chávez’s allies and fellow Bolivarian Revolutionaries: Bolivian President Evo Morales, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

And let’s not forget the Tri-Border Area,

Argentine officials believe Hezbollah is still active in the TBA. They attribute the detonation of a car bomb outside Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires on 17 March 1992 to Hezbollah extremists. Officials also maintain that with Iran’s assistance, Hezbollah carried out a car-bomb attack on the main building of the Jewish Community Center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires on 18 July 1994 in protest of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement that year.

Most of this report will not come as a surprise to long-term readers of Fausta’s blog, but you must read it all.

He has weakened the rule of law, undermined democracy, and nationalized a significant portion of the economy while seeking to implement an ambitious land-redistribution agenda. Bolivia has the second-largest natural-gas reserves in South America. Yet Morales nationalized the industry in 2006, with predictably negative consequences. Last summer, the president of the Bolivian Chamber of Hydrocarbons told the Financial Times that his country’s natural-gas reserves were shrinking “because there have not been any significant investments in the past five years.”

Indeed, through nationalization schemes, price controls, and other anti-business measures, Morales has chased away both domestic and foreign investors. As Bolivian economist Waldo López said last year, “The government has a foreign-investment phobia, and its nationalization processes and the lack of clear rules are creating lack of confidence.” The World Bank’s 2011 “Doing Business” survey ranks Bolivia 149 out of 183 economies, behind even Sierra Leone and Syria. It is the poorest nation in South America, and among the very poorest in the entire Western Hemisphere.

Why should this matter to the USA?

The United States has more than a passing interest in Bolivia’s future. After all, the country is a major cocaine producer. Morales expelled the Drug Enforcement Administration from his country back in 2008, and a new U.S. government report says that Bolivia has “failed demonstrably” to combat drug trafficking and meet its international obligations. It has also strengthened relations with the Iranian theocracy. According to the Associated Press, a 2009 Israeli foreign ministry document accused Bolivia (and Venezuela) of providing Tehran with uranium.

As I have posted in the past, Iran is taking a much more active interest in our hemisphere. Add Bolivia to their roster.